Fables of the Reconstruction: Low-Hanging Fruit Pt. 4 - Gatefolds

If you really want to get into the spirit of Record Store Day, squeeze through the used aisles and pick up a few gatefolds. These oversized works of mass-produced art are the quintessential vinyl experience. They say you can’t roll a joint on a digital download. But you can eat an entire midnight munchies meal off of an open gatefold. And many of them are cheap cheap cheap. Some of my favorites were a mere $2.99. Like the three Carole King albums I own, Tapestry, Music, and Rhymes & Reasons. All together they cost me less than the price of a good sandwich, and they’re classic specimens, especially the latter two: great big pictures of Carole at a grand piano with her husky at her side and sunlight warming through the window; soft close-ups of her smiling and lost in thought. They’ve got a matte finish with a linen texture that feels nice on your fingers. It’s intimate, like you’re in Carole’s house and sipping tea as she sings to you. And I’m not ashamed to say I love Carole King, gatefold or no. I was a little kid when her music was everywhere and it couldn’t help but shape my mind and soul. “So Far Away” gets me every time, even when Johnny Rivers sings it, which he does quite well on Home Grown, his best, in my opinion. Here the guy who sang “Secret Agent Man” goes on a jag through sunny early 70s commune-esque spirituality. This record also comes in a gatefold. Another matte finish, faux linen, but with lots of pictures of Johnny with a bushy beard, smiling, in meadows full of tall grass and flowers. He sings the hell out of some of the best songs of that era – “Our Lady of the Well,” “Rock Me On the Water,” “Fire and Rain.” Just a gorgeous record.

            Some classic gatefolds don’t qualify as low-hanging fruit because they’re expensive, such as the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, arguably the greatest album cover of all time, at least for people who have taken a lot of acid. A 3D photo of the band in wizard costumes is not easily topped. Inside is a maze and a crazy collage. I got my copy for 70 bucks in Atlanta – the exact same pressing of the one I got for Christmas my junior year in high school, brand new in the shrink-wrap. Probably cost $10 back then. No, what we’re interested in here is art for the poor man: Santana’s Caravanserai – big orange sun over a dark blue sky and desert and camels, inside a gloriously blurry sunset over the ocean; Allman Brothers’ Eat A Peach – peaches and melons the size of truck beds on the front and back, opens to a vast panorama of Magic Mushroom Land; Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Visions of the Emerald Beyond – mirrored pyramids that rise lengthwise, up and down, one to sunrise, the other to night; Gentle Giant’s Acquiring the Taste looks like a tongue licking an ass until you open and see it’s just a delicious peach; and all those Yes covers by Roger Dean, especially Close To the Edge, which is their best musically, too (even if you hate Yes you should own a Yes/Roger Dean gatefold, it’s an obligation of the hobby). There are so many.

            And if a gatefold isn’t enough, there are double gatefolds, too, and gatefolds with inserts, booklets, and records that aren’t even gatefolds, they just have odd shapes, like The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys and Shoot Out at the Fantasy Factory by Traffic, which have two corners cut out and the art is an optical illusion of a 3D box that looks very real if you stare at it long enough. This kind of super packaging is generally the domain of superstars like Elton John, Jefferson Airplane, Harry Nilsson, Joni Mitchell, artists with big budgets and a fondness for excess. After Nilsson Schmilsson, Nilsson was all gatefold for the rest of the 70s. Pussy Cats and Duit On Mon Dei are both triple folds with lyrics on one spread and on the other, collages of snapshots taken during the making of the album, both of which appear to have been outrageous parties. Mitchell uses the double gatefold for her underrated tour de force Mingus to give it more of an art book feel, with her paintings of Charles in fields of white with delicate lines of text here and there. But few can top Elton and the Airplane (and still qualify as low-hanging fruit). Their more elaborately packaged albums are like mixed-media happenings you can hold in your very hands. Elton’s albums have a Hollywood flair. Tumbleweed Connection comes with a twelve-page sepia-tone booklet full of 19^th Century old West etchings - trains and riverboats and guns, shots of Elton and his band and lyricist brooding dramatically. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road folds out three ways like one of those reflective things people used to hold up across their chests to get a darker tan. All the lyrics are splayed across in all different colors and each one has its own little illustration, like those old time movie posters with drawings of the actors and the most dramatic scenes. And the whole concept of Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player is a night at the picture show. The cover shows a couple buying tickets at a theater with album’s title across the marquee. Inside, on the left panel, the song titles and album credits are laid out just like a movie poster, and on the right is a big picture of Elton holding his hand out like a stop sign. It’s all colorized and cool looking, and so are all the other photos in the booklet it opens up to. Page after page of groovy cool-colored pictures. It’s just a wonderful artifact. I think mine cost $4. And Jefferson Airplane. Volunteers and Bark: two of the best covers ever made, and both relatively inexpensive. Bark comes in a paper bag with JA printed on the front, just like the old A&P logo. Open it up and on the other side are freak-comic portraits of the band in thick-black ink. The bag is folded over a standard record cover with picture of a dead fish wrapped in paper and tied in string with a bow. And inside is a fold-open lyric sheet printed in red and black, and on the back is a list of things you can do with the bag. A long list and, as you might imagine, some of the suggestions are quite unusual. I love this record, even though it’s not the record I reach for when I want to really listen to the Jefferson Airplane (I play it when I want to hear early, very well done hard rock). When I want the Airplane in its fullest revolutionary glory, it’s gotta be Volunteers, a Woodstock-era masterpiece with the freakiest and coolest mega-gatefold of all times. It’s done up like a newspaper published in Mescaline Land, with phony stories and lots of pictures. It has so much going on, you can stare it for hours. And that’s really what the gatefold is all about – sitting and staring and listening, slowing down, paying attention, making an event out of a collection of music. And isn’t that precisely what we celebrate when we celebrate RSD?

Fables of the Reconstruction: Low-Hanging Fruit, Pt. 3

More cheap thrills from the used vinyl bins…

Jesse Colin Young – Together

This is a no-frills early-70s downhome hippy-rock record that goes just right with a beer at the end of a hard day, or a bong hit at the start of an easy one. The opener is “Good Times,” a sweet reminiscence of the summers of love in San Fran, and the remaining ten songs range from blues to boogie-woogie to country to folk, a near-even mix of covers and originals, all tied together with Young’s smooth, mellow-my-mind voice. Seriously, his singing is right up there with the very best, whether it’s a tender love song, like the title track, or the relentlessly happy “Lovely Day,” or “Peace Song,” which is every bit as idealistic and hopeful and love-inspiring as “Get Together” was. I got this record for $2.99 at Twist and Shout and it plays with hardly a crackle. I listen to it often.

Emerson Lake and Palmer – Tarkus

Side one is a rock symphony called this:

Tarkus- Eruption
- Stones of Years
- Iconoclast
- Manticore
- Battlefield
- Aquatarkus

And, as the name suggests, it’s 20 minutes of prog awesomeness. Hard to describe without making weird noises with a high-pitched voice and a spastic tongue. Drum solos, bass solos, keyboard solos, all soloing at full speed at the same time, in perfect sync, and a climactic, soaring guitar solo near the end. Honestly, I’m kind of hinky on ELP because they were such good musicians and, judging from the film footage I’ve seen of them in concert, they were insufferably arrogant about it. And on some of their records they sound a little too safe for me. But not this one. It’s exactly the kind of balls-out pretentiousness I want when I reach for prog.

Tom Tom Club – Close to the Bone

Unexpectedly trippy. Like Remain in Light trippy, but happy, and way more danceable. There are lots of beats that weave in and out and bounce all across the stereo, super synthed-up with echoes and cosmic curviness. No kidding, these dance tracks are as atmospheric and complex as the Talking Heads at their early-80s best. This record stands as a solid companion to Speaking in Tongues, released the same year. I don’t remember this band being so good. When I was in my teens and always hunting for freaky shit, I thought Tom Tom Club was just better than average synth-dance-pop, and that wasn’t really my thing. But if I’d only known just how far out this record gets in a tight universe of butt-bumping boogie, I would’ve jumped in and boogied too, maybe even gotten laid. (“He’s the man with the four-way hips!”) This record isn’t better than average. It’s where this kind of music went when it died. 

Fables of the Reconstruction: Low-Hanging Fruit Pt. 2

When I got back into collecting vinyl, my first impulse was to buy back all the stuff I owned before I went digital. The classics. But once I’d collected most of those, I wanted more, more, more. I’m not rich, so this means buying cheap – stuff that’s in abundance in the used bins and in relatively low demand. (And some of which is not even available on CD.) I call this bounty low-hanging fruit. Last week I shared a few of my recent favorite finds. Here are some more:

Nilsson – Pussy Cats

If you believe the documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson?, the late great singer/songwriter peaked with Nilsson Schmilsson and then binged his way through a bunch of mediocre-to-bad albums to oblivion. His tenth album, Pussycats, is singled out as a particularly low moment: party buddy John Lennon pushed him past the edge and blew out his beautiful voice. Which is true, except it leaves out the fact that it’s flat-out gorgeous. I mean, come on. This is rock and roll. Destruction is an essential part of the aesthetic. And what else would you expect from Lennon (the man who took acid everyday for like a year or something as part of a conscious quest to destroy his ego, and who, by his own admission, succeeded) directing Nilsson (the man who’d ask friends out for a drink and they’d come home three days later without a clue of where they’d been or what they’d done). It’s a spectacular mess of an album, and so weird. Yes, his voice cracks. There’s only about three seconds of his unworldly high-pitched smoothness. And at times he actually sounds like Lennon on parts of Imagine and Plastic Ono Band. But he’s raw in the best rock and roll way – like Sam Cooke at the Harlem Club or Joe Strummer or Bruce or any other gravel throat who’s ever ripped the guts right out of your solar plexus. And he’s surrounded with Lennon’s fuzzed-out trippy pop arrangements. Mine cost twelve bucks, which is a little high for a low-fruit designation, but I’d have paid three more for it, even without the double gatefold full of mid-session snapshots of Nilsson and Lennon and everyone else who joined the party.

Grace Slick and Paul Kantner – Sunfighter

When I look at the cover of this album, I wonder what it was like being the daughter of a couple as freaky as Kantner and Slick. Baby China appears on the cover naked and chubby, held up toward the sun on the hands of her mom and dad, which are rising out of the sea. The gatefold opens to a photo collage of cosmic explosions, and the inner sleeve has a picture of Kantner and Slick side by side, both of them young kids -- him standing erect in his military uniform, her at a piano, sitting as straight as an Aryan, in her officer coat and tails. On the other side is a dystopian poem called “Pets.” It’s a very odd artifact in celebration of a newborn child, and it’s made stranger still by the fact that it was mass-produced and sold around the world. I had a huge crush on China when I was in high school and she was an MTV VJ, and now, 41 years later, I own a copy of her baby album that I got for $2.99 from Twist and Shout. It has heavy ring wear and the initials “JB” in the upper left hand corner. As for the music, it’s all eminently listenable, if not consistently memorable: solid, somewhat hard-driving, early 70s rock, with some acoustic strands woven in here and there, and lots of Kantner fantasy/sci-fi lyrics about wizards and lizards and the like. But the album has stellar high points. Side one breaks down halfway through into a wonderful wash of outer space freakiness. And side two features “China,” Slick’s ode to her daughter, which begins, “She’ll suck on anything you give her.” It’s just piano and swells of strings toward the end, and Slick’s voice is magnificent as she sings of her child and the world: “It all comes in, so fast, it all comes in.” Surely China has a fondness for that one.

Steve Hackett – Voyage of the Acolyte and Please Don’t Touch!

Records by ex-Genesis ax man Hackett abound in the used vinyl racks, and they really put the old “don’t judge a book by its cover” credo to the test, because almost all of them have hideously cheesy artwork. But some are full of great music, and are worth much more than their miniscule asking price. Odds are you can get a bunch for less than $20. Voyage of the Acolyte is generally agreed to be his best, and it’s certainly the most psychedelic. One good friend described it to me as “blobular.” Hackett’s main gift, other than his stratospheric guitar playing, is his ability to craft complex and epic arrangements, and Voyage takes your ears around the world forward and backward through time. So does his second solo effort, Please Don’t Touch!, the first to feature his mastery of a Roland GR-500 Guitar Synthesizer. The sounds shift from stuff that would be perfect for a sci-fi movie soundtrack, full of amplified drama and tension and weird sounds, to lovely strains of classical-inspired acoustic guitar, to late-70s guitar-god pop. The vocal tracks, few and far between, are a bit unexpected. They feature guest singers Richie Havens, Steve Walsh of Kansas and R&B siren Randy Crawford, a trio whose voices are so distinct that they would give the record a various-artists feel, were it not for the connective thread of Hackett’s considerable composition talents.